[liberationtech] Web3 is BS

Mon Feb 21 16:07:05 CET 2022

So. Your suggestion is give up?

I find web3 has some interesting aspects. I do not think
it has found the right applications yet.

Will it kill capitalism or reform social media, no? I do
think it has potential to do more than other things evolving
right now.

On 2/21/22 09:36, Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes wrote:
> Right On.
> 
> It’s a political issue. Technology just obfuscates the whole thing, the 
> mirage of progress. Techie Messianism.
> 
> Best Regards | Cordiales Saludos | Yakoke,
> 
> Andrés L. Pacheco Sanfuentes
> <alps at acm.org <mailto:alps at acm.org>>
> +1 (817) 754-0431
> WACHÍČIŠ’AKE | BLIHEIC'YA YO
> 
> 
>> On Feb 21, 2022, at 8:06 AM, Yosem Companys <ycompanys at gmail.com 
>> <mailto:ycompanys at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> I found this to be an interesting post, especially in the context of 
>> Liberationtech's having supported the development of Diaspora, one of 
>> the most successful federated social networking sites.
>>
>> Elon Musk is right. Web3 is BS.
>> By Maciej Baron
>> Jan 9 2022
>> <https://maciekbaron.medium.com/elon-musk-is-right-web3-is-bs-1cdafc3f96f7 
>> <https://maciekbaron.medium.com/elon-musk-is-right-web3-is-bs-1cdafc3f96f7>>
>>
>> To put it mildly, I am not Elon’s biggest fan. He’s an ignorant, 
>> narcissistic, reckless, self-indulgent buffoon who treats his 
>> employees like crap, and who just happens to be amazing at marketing 
>> himself, which helped him become a billionaire, despite running 
>> unprofitable companies.
>>
>> Musk however, recently tweeted something that I wholeheartedly agree 
>> with: “Web3 sounds like bs”.
>>
>> Web3 is an idea, which even Bloomberg admitted is a bit hazy, which 
>> suggests we can achieve a decentralised World Wide Web using 
>> blockchains. The proponents of this concept like to talk about how Web 
>> 2.0 became centralised and controlled by big corporations, and how 
>> blockchains, crypto and NFTs can help “give the power back to the people”.
>>
>> This all sounds wonderful and looks good on paper, but in reality, 
>> it’s simply bullshit.
>>
>> WebBs
>>
>> Web3 is bullshit on several different levels, but most importantly, it 
>> confuses a political and power-relationship problem with a 
>> technological one. According to Web3 believers, blockchain is the 
>> technology that can finally allow the Web to go back to its 
>> decentralised roots. The truth is, blockchains are not only useless in 
>> achieving that, we already have the technology to do that.
>>
>> ActivityPub is a protocol that has been available for years, and which 
>> inspired the creation of fairly successful decentralised, federated 
>> social networks such as Mastodon. Any community can create their own 
>> ActivityPub instance which is controlled by them — even a single user 
>> can create their own server instance if they want to, and federate 
>> with other instances. It’s a beautiful architecture that allows people 
>> to control who has access to their feeds, and what sort of feeds they 
>> are exposed to.
>>
>> So why haven’t we seen a mass exodus of people from Twitter and 
>> Facebook to Mastodon, or similar platforms? The technology is there, 
>> the platform is there — all it takes is to register and switch.
>>
>> The reason for this is that platforms like Twitter have already 
>> achieved enormous power and influence, and a large user base that 
>> simply stays where most of the people they follow are. There are 
>> plenty of stories of people switching over to Mastodon, only to return 
>> to Twitter shortly after, because that’s “where all the action is”. 
>> Companies like Twitter spend millions on “customer retention”; they 
>> help big brands improve their presence online and give users plenty of 
>> reasons to stay and stick to Twitter.
>>
>> The monopolistic nature of the biggest social media platforms is also 
>> beneficial to other companies, which can streamline their advertising 
>> and marketing campaigns — this benefits the wider capitalist system. 
>> The monopoly of the big players is a natural result of the system we 
>> have in place.
>>
>> The Web3 thinking is based on the naive technocratic assumption that 
>> technology and “smart ideas” can solve most of our societal problems. 
>> Its naivety also expands to the belief that free-market capitalism is 
>> the solution to the encroachment of monopolies, and not the system 
>> that is in fact actively creating and enlarging them.
>>
>> There isn’t a technology that will solve this, and this isn’t 
>> happening because of a lack of a certain technology. We already have 
>> tools to create a decentralised web, and blockchains aren’t even the 
>> right technology to begin with.
>>
>> Blockchains, NFTs and crypto-bullshit
>>
>> A blockchain is a form of a digital ledger, which consists of records 
>> called blocks. Such a database is managed autonomously using a 
>> peer-to-peer network, meaning there is no main, centralised machine 
>> controlling the whole infrastructure. Instead everything is controlled 
>> collectively by all the nodes connected to the network.
>>
>> The main purpose of a blockchain, and really the only reason it can be 
>> made useful, is to record transactions. It is admittedly a fairly 
>> clever way of avoiding the double spending problem — when a digital 
>> token is spent twice (or multiple times), that is, transferred to 
>> multiple destinations at once. This is also why, so far, the only 
>> major use of blockchains is for digital currency, and artificially 
>> scarce digital assets (Non-Fungible Tokens — NFTs).
>>
>> Some people have suggested that NFTs could be used for recording 
>> things like deeds and property titles, but it makes little sense to 
>> use blockchains for recording anything physical or anything that 
>> requires off-chain validation, authorisation, authentication or 
>> confirmation — even if we consider the use of oracles. Blockchains 
>> only make sense in a digital-only world, and only for transactional 
>> data — and so far nobody came up with a compelling dapp idea 
>> (decentralized application) that is not tied to cryptocurrency in any way.
>>
>> This is why when some Web3 evangelists talk about how social media is 
>> centralised and how blockchains can help, you know they’re 
>> bullshitting you.
>>
>> Social media posts are not transactional data. You may have “likes” 
>> that you can give to posts, but the double spending problem is not 
>> relevant here, because you have an unrestricted and unlimited supply 
>> of “likes”. We already have decades old technologies like PGP which 
>> can prove the authenticity of a post. We already have distributed, 
>> peer-to-peer technologies allowing for censorship-proof, decentralised 
>> storage of data (such as WebTorrent used by PeerTube).
>>
>> Unstoppable Domains looks okay on paper, but it’s a for-profit 
>> solution that isn’t really as decentralised as it pretends to be: you 
>> still have to go through UD to purchase domains. Moreover, getting 
>> around a DNS block is quite trivial, and “unstoppable” domains won’t 
>> solve the problem of a hard IP block by your IPS if used as a DNS 
>> provider.
>>
>> Projects like the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) are interesting, 
>> and were already used to fight against censorship. However, the 
>> pricing model is slightly obfuscated, the cost of “pinning” (permanent 
>> storage) is a few times higher compared to regular storage solutions. 
>> If you’re using a company like Pinata to host (“pin”) your content and 
>> guarantee its permanence while you pay a monthly fee, you should start 
>> asking yourself how much decentralisation you are really left with if 
>> you still rely on your hosting provider and on the caching policy of 
>> independent nodes. Moreover, we already have magnet links, Tor Onion 
>> services and platforms like FreeNet, which is nearly 22 years old now 
>> (the web itself is only 9 years older).
>>
>> The technology is already here! We have had similar technologies for 
>> decades now! …and new technology is not what we need to fight the 
>> enormous power of the biggest platforms. That’s bullshit.
>>
>> [snip]
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